Czech scientists make cover of Science with nanocrystals research

Czech scientists have made the cover of the prestigious Science magazine
with their discovery of a unique method determining the structure of
nanocrystals. The new findings can have an important impact on scientific
fields such as pharmaceuticals, synthetic chemistry, or the development of
new materials. Lukáš Palatinus of the Institute of Physics of the Czech
Academy of Sciences, who was the head of the research team, told me more
about the discovery:

Lukáš Palatinus, photo: archive of Lukáš Palatinus
“The discovery concerns a scientific discipline called crystallography,
which successfully tries to determine the atomic structure of crystalline
materials. Knowing the atomic structure is extremely important because it
determines the properties of every crystalline material.

“We concentrated on determining crystal structures from nanocrystals,
which are very small crystals. And why is this important?

“Methods to determine crystal structures from large crystals, larger
than 10 or 20 micrometres, are well established. But many materials do not
form such large crystals and in such cases, when only micro or nanocrystals
are available, it has been very difficult so far to determine the crystal
structure.

“We used scattering of electrons in the nanocrystals using electron
microscope, to determine atomic structures of nanocrystals with such
sensitivity, that we can detect all atoms in the periodic table, including
the lightest of all, and that is hydrogen.”

What will be the practical outcome of your research?

“I think that the importance of this research and the reason why it was
featured in Science is simply the fact that its potential impact is very
broad.

“To name just a few fields where materials forming only nanocrystals are
important, it is pharmaceuticals, the preparation of new drugs, or
geosciences, the investigation of processes in Earth or synthetic
chemistry, the preparation of new catalysts which are materials used for
more efficient preparation of materials in chemical industry.

“So these are just a few examples where crystallography is very
important and where our discovery will probably help in doing work faster
and more efficiently.”

As you have already said, your discovery is featured on the front page of
the American Science magazine. How important is it for you and for your
future research?

“The fact that it was published in Science is definitely a great success
but it is not our goal. The goal of the research is to bring the method to
as many people as possible so that they can use it. The fact that it
appears on the cover of Science will definitely help a lot in making people
aware of this research.”